RUNNING CREATES UNITY FROM TRAGEDY

NEW YORK – “The Boston Marathon,” my 8-year-old daughter Danya wrote in an essay the day of the race, “is the world’s oldest annual marathon. More than 20,000 people run in the race,” she went on, “and more than 500,000 people watch it live.”

Those 20,000 runners, as well as the 500,000 spectators and the hundreds of millions who watched remotely, suffered a grievous blow on Monday.

Some of those runners ran the last race of their lives after losing their legs to ball bearings and nails planted by the dastardly perpetrators. One 8-year-old boy, a huge sports and running enthusiast, will never again have the chance to compete. One student visiting from China won’t be returning home.

But the nature of running, and the American spirit, is that we run on, despite the odds, and without fear.

Exactly 15 years ago, I finished the same Boston Marathon now marred by terror, hobbled down Boylston Street cheered by the same raucous crowds, crossed the same finish line disfigured by cowardice, and cooled down in the same Copley Square mauled by the blasts.

The unique cocktail of exhaustion and exhilaration that accompanies the completion of a marathon is drunk only by a few, but the buzz is shared by those urging the entrants not to despair. It’s the very ordinariness of the competitors in a sporting event like a 26.2-mile race that inspires spectators to give it a go themselves. Folks one year holding motivational signs (one of my favorites from this year’s Carlsbad Half-Marathon read, “That’s not sweat – it’s your fat crying!”) will in turn be motivated by similar signs the next year.

And in tragedy, too, spectators and runners were inextricably bound together. Scenes of heroism abounded in Boston, with runners who’d just finished the race applying tourniquets to the legs of those in the stands, and vice versa. The bombings themselves seemed to further the unity felt by participants and observers alike.

Interestingly, many communities choose to observe and remember tragedies like 9/11 through charity runs or walks, like the ones in New York, Washington D.C., and even Sacramento. Back home in North County, after Chelsea King was abducted and slain while taking her usual run, her parents and community supporters organized “Finish Chelsea’s Run,” now an annual tradition.

The anxiety and sadness that linger even years after a trauma give way, however temporarily, to a physical and emotional catharsis generated by the visceral, foot-to-the-pavement act of running. “The more restricted our society and work become,” Sir Roger Bannister, the first man to run a sub-four-minute mile, once said of running, “the more necessary it will be to find some outlet for this craving for freedom. No one can say, ‘You must not run faster than this, or jump higher than that.’ The human spirit is indomitable.”

Indeed it is, and so it will be with Boston, too. When news first broke here in New York, I was too shaken up to pull on my sneakers. As I walked through Central Park that evening, it seemed eerily quiet, devoid of the hundreds of runners who every day course through its trails and roads.

But by the next day, a certain defiance had taken hold. Runners, myself included, returned to the park, and many proudly wore their distinctive blue-and-yellow Boston Athletic Association gear in solidarity with those who ran, but didn’t finish, Monday’s race.

In fact, in the Big Apple, a kinship with Boston unseen since the Revolutionary War has suffused the hearts of even the most ardent Yankee fan. “We stand shoulder to shoulder with our friends in Boston, as all Americans do,” said New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg.

Yankee officials hung a sign outside the House that Ruth Built bearing a Yankee and Red Sox logo and the words, “United We Stand.” And during the third inning of Tuesday’s game, Yankee fans belted out Neil Diamond’s “Sweet Caroline,” the unofficial anthem of the Red Sox much as Bostonians humbly crooned Frank Sinatra’s “New York, New York” in the wake of the 9/11 attacks.

So let us continue to find an outlet for our craving for freedom and for the unity of the human spirit. “The Boston Marathon,” my daughter concluded, “is known as one of the best marathons in the world.” It sure is, Danya, and long may it continue to bring us together.

Rosen is an attorney in Carmel Valley. Contact him at michaelmrosen@yahoo.com